Drabbles for AriE
by Naril
Summary: attempt to jumpstart my muse: ten more drabbles in new chapter
1. Chapter 1

Yes, yes, yes... I've decided to dabble (Drabble hihi) in this fandom too. You know why? Cause these two dont get enough loving and I really like this pairing. Also I'm stuck in bed sick and these all-in-one tablets have been messing with my brain.

I recycled this:

Rules:  
><em>1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.<br>2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.  
>3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it's over. No lingering afterwards!<br>4. Do ten of these, then post them._

Anyhow. I really enjoyed this. The last one was a bit scary to write and I tried so hard not to cheat, except for spelling mistakes. XD

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><p>1. Slide – GooGooDolls<p>

He could not help but watch them. It was irritating and every time Arthur called him for a job offer, he told himself it was the last time he would work with them.

He just could not understand why she was so drawn to the Point Man. Alright, so maybe he did, but it did not stop him from getting this knot in his stomach when he saw her smile at the younger man and he resented to admit that he wanted her to look at him like that.

Once he had gotten really drunk during a celebration of a job well done and he had leant close to her, ignoring the fact that she must smell the alcohol in his breath and asked her to run away with him.

She has just laughed at him.

2. Winds of Change – The Scorpions

She was not sure how it had happened. He had always been more the bigger brother. She had never thought he would think of her this way. Sure, she had felt differently, but surely he only saw her as a little girl. He had been too good at playing that part.

Yet holing out in the little basement in Kairo, waiting out the revolution that was taking place, had slowly made her realise otherwise. It was Arthur that was his brother and that was why he had never shown his interest. Now they were alone and she was terrified.

Wordlessly he had moved to embrace her and so they sat in a corner, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, flinching with each new explosion from upstairs. Would the house collapse on top of them?

The Forger did not seem worried about anything up there, focusing on her instead. He was holding her to him, rubbing circles on her back to try and soothe her, as little as it helped. Eventually he nuzzled her neck intimately and for a second she stiffened, but then she hugged herself closer.

This was how Arthur found them when he came back for them.

3. Bossy - Kelis

Arthur could not handle her snarkiness. He would just stand there and stare at her for a moment when she critized anything about his work or asked more questions than he thought appropriate. She probably only noticed because their relationship was the same.

He did not like change. She liked to change things and to play around with new discoveries.

It was what ended them.

It was what sent her off on a rampage only to end up standing in front of Eames' hotel room, soaked to the bone and eyes red. He looked at her for just a second too long, then ushered her in and made to reach for his phone to call Arthur when she stopped him.

„Is it really bad that I'm different?"

He put the phone down and smiled at her, the first genuine smile she had seen from him.

„No, darling. It's ok. In fact, I liked you better when you were bossing Cobb around than when you tune it down like you do now."

It made her smile too.

4. Chinese Democracy – Guns'n'Roses

„Sometimes I don't understand how you do it." She said one day when he turned up out of nowhere by her doorstep with a bullet-wound on his shoulder.

„What?" He simply asked and winced when she prodded the injury.

She made him sit on her sofa and told him to take his shirt off as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It caught Eames off-guard having taken her for something a lot more innocent.

She came back to find he had done what she asked, but it was not the half-naked man that made her stop. He was wearing old dog-tags around his neck. She stared.

"You never told me you used to be military." She said when she caught herself again.

He looked down and sighed. "Not something I like to remember. All bastards if you ask me."

She never mentioned it again, nor did she remark on the way he wrinkled his nose when he saw footage on Iraq and Afghanistan on TV.

5. Frozen - Madonna

They had had a fight. A big one too.

She was sitting on the sofa and stared at her tv that was not even turned on. He had stormed out, telling her to calm the fuck down until he got back.

What had bothered her the most had been the blank face he had kept through the whole thing. She had left Arthur because he had been like that, had been fooled by the actor in Eames that he would somehow be warmer and more accessible. Now she knew better.

He was just as cold. He simply covered it up with all the dry humour and easy banter. She had accused him of exactly that, that he did not give a shit about her, did he.

She did not know what to do, had just sat in her apartment for hours, wondering if he really would come back. Maybe he just took the next flight out of the country. It would not surprise her.

There was a knock on the door then.

She got up despite herself, hoping that perhaps she had not driven him away because really it did not matter what he felt because she could feel enough for both of them.

When the door opened to reveal his eyes gleaming with apology, she could do nothing but let him back in.

6. More than That – Backstreet Boys

He had gone to the other room to take the phone call that he had anticipated for hours now. He had taken her phone from her because of that reason.

Ariadne was asleep in his hotel bed, her eyes swollen from tears. He could punch the guy in the face.

"Arthur." He greeted once he put the phone to his ear.

"No, you can't speak to her." He replied to the question. It was the typical monotone and it riled him up more.

"Do you have any idea what you have done to her? What happened to not getting involved with your co-workers?" He barked into the device unaware that she had woken and snuck out of bed to listen in.

"I don't care! She deserves better and you know it." There was a pause, she strained to hear his sigh. "Well, maybe. I could not hurt her worse than you, could I?"

Her eyes widened.

7. Sound of Silence – Simon and Garfunkel.

Eames had long since decided that he was long past feeling alone. Yet here he was, leaning against a street-corner near her apartment, one arm wrapped around his side, pressing down on the slowly spreading stain of red there feeling exactly that.

He had bloodied his phone when he had called her, still not sure when he had decided that she needed to come help him because he could not make it to the haven of her place by himself.

The little architect had sounded scared. Was she scared for him? That would be a new one.

The sound of the city around him was dimming and his legs were slowly giving way underneath him. He just hoped she would be there soon.

Were those footsteps or had he imagined it? He tried shaking his head against his caving in vision and the deafening ring of blood rushing through his ears.

A glimpse of a red scarf and she was there, her small frame trying to hold his much larger one up as he collapsed against her all sound ceasing.

8. Bad Company – Bad Company

He was acting distant. She should have expected it, but had still hoped it would have been different.

"Eames?" She asked, putting her palm to his scruffy cheek to make him look at her, something he had been studiously avoiding for the whole morning. "tell me."

That was all she said and knew that it may not be enough for him to talk to her, to explain what made him withdraw suddenly.

He looked at her, sadness creeping into his eyes, something that made her realise how serious this was for him because he never displayed his emotions like this.

"I should stop coming here." He eventually told her, the hand he lifted to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear telling her that it was the last thing he wanted.

"Why?"

"I'm not good for you." He muttered, "I'm a criminal and people want me dead."

She had no answer, so she just pulled him to her with surprising strength and kissed him.

9. Nighttrain – Guns'n'Roses

It was not as often as he liked to make people think that Eames got drunk off his arse. Tonight was one of those nights though.

He had dragged Ariadne and Arthur with him to a sleazy bar in that part of Paris that she usually did not visit to celebrate a finished extraction that the three of them had done together. The first one after the old team had disbanded.

She had watched him since they had started working and more so now. There was something off about him, she realised. Some weight on his shoulders that had not been there during the Fischer job. He knocked back another shot and she decided that he clearly only had the goal of drinking himself senseless.

She walked up to him from where he had been watching her and Arthur with bleary eyes.

"Eames, what happened to you?" She asked.

He tried the familiar smirk but it looked sloppy and she knew he was close to passing out; had to be from the amount he had been drinking.

"You, darling." He slurred and pulled her in for a bear hug.

Then he had whispered something in her ear and she had laughed, thinking he was joking.

10. Fallen - Evanescence

She was dying. It was a dream. It should have been fine, but the panicked eyes looking down at her told her otherwise.

"It's okay, I'll just see you on the other side." She croaked, wondering why his shoulders were shaking like this.

"I know." He whispered, blue eyes flicking to the bullet wounds in her chest. "I know." He said again, but she somehow felt he did not.

"If we want to keep doing this…" She coughed up blood. "You'll have to get used to it just like I do."

"I know. It was my idea. But you're different. It feels too real." She heard him say as her surroundings faded to black and her head lolled lifelessly against his shoulder.

* * *

><p>Right...some of them worked, some of them didn't work in the obvious way because my association became a bit weird. like Winds of Change is so political I couldn't figure out how to make it fit the characters. And the last one was scary because I could not kill her and I was panicking for half the song if I could make it work or not. It felt OOC to me... oh well. I'll stop ranting now.<p>

Anyway, that was it. Tell me what you think.


	2. Chapter 2

I think the fact that I'm reading Wuthering Heights has affected my writing without me noticing. How odd.

Also some of these are a bit random… meh… just tried to jumpstart my muse.

I changed the order and won't let me add the list at the end of the original order... oh well. Basically Let It Rain came on first and so Ariadne had to play with them because... well and then all the other songs just seemed to fit into a storyline from then on.

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><p><strong>The Return of the King – Howard Shore (LotR- OST)<strong>

"What are you reading?"

Ariadne almost jumped at the voice where she was sprawled out on the beaten sofa. She had not heard him come in.

They had hired another warehouse for their purposes and this one came with a nice reading corner for her.

"The Lord of The Rings." She told him, trying to hide that she had been so immersed in the book, that she had forgotten that her lunch-break must have ended a long time ago if Eames was already back from his surveillance.

He raised an eyebrow and she blushed. "It's sort of my favourite book. I haven't read it in a while."

He grinned and without even making sure her feet were out of the way sat on the sofa as well.

"Ah, let me guess. You were one of those girls who wanted to be an elf-lady." He teased.

"No." She wrinkled her nose in a severely childish way, but she was taken back to when she had first read the book aged eleven and everyone had teased her in a similar fashion.

"They're pretty useless really."

Still amused, the Forger leant closer. "Thought you would make a better Shieldmaiden anyway. Slaying Ringwraiths and all. "

She blinked. "You're the first one to get my favourite character right."

"Comes with the job-description." Eames, satisfied, got back to his feet.

"Who's yours?" She called after him when he walked towards his desk. She just couldn't resist talking about Tolkien if she got the chance.

The Forger turned back around. "Well, I used to admire Faramir the most when I was a kid." He said with a wink. "I do fancy myself more of a wizard though."

* * *

><p><strong>He's a Pirate – Klaus Badelt (POTC – OST)<strong>

"Do you even know how to get this thing going?" She asked, squinting up at the high mast of the sailing yacht they were standing on.

"Not really. That's what the crew is for." He replied, looking out at the sea.

"Great. Our own bunch of projections. You know I get sea-sick in real life, right?"

* * *

><p><strong>Maneater – Nelly Furtado<strong>

He had not expected her to do these sort of things. If Eames did not know any better he would say that he was not the one doing the seducing, it was her.

He was sprawled out in her bed, with her naked form asleep on top of his, her face in the crook of his neck.

He could not believe she had even called. The only reason he had snuck her the number of his old phone in Mombassa had been because he had wanted to irk Arthur. He had even made sure the Point Man saw it. It was a simple little joke, nothing else.

How was he to know she would not only contact him, but by the time they had met up for the third time (it wasn't dates, he told himself, he was too old to go on dates with a girl her age) she had taken him back to her apartment.

He could not believe he had gotten that lucky.

* * *

><p><strong>Master of Puppets - Metallica<strong>

She had wanted to be in control. She had wanted to get back at Arthur for leaving her all by herself after leading her along for so long.

For a while it had worked.

Through Eames, she had gotten access again to the business and he had been surprisingly willing to go along with it all. Actually, the biggest surprise had been that he had not simply up and left.

She had taken him for the love them and leave them type, but then for a while she assumed he was quite happy with the little arrangement they had.

It took her quite long to figure out that she had underestimated his emotional range.

The way he looked at her changed. The occasional touches more intimate, more tender.

And then they started to work with Arthur again because he simply was the best Point Man and though Eames was happy to double as Extractor, they needed backup and in one of her darker moments she had felt satisfaction that Arthur would see them together.

Except that he seemed oblivious to it. Or maybe he simply did not care.

And then one night, she had gotten unimaginably drunk with friends and called him.

Usually Eames now stayed around her apartment, but this time he had been gone for reasons she did not particularly care for.

She had shouted at him, had confessed the fact that she resented him for playing with her. Arthur had said very little, more concerned about something else but she would not let him stop her from her tirade and when she was done, too out of her head to throw anything else at him, he said one sentence.

"Eames is right next to me."

She hung up, searching frantically for her totem, found that yes, this was reality. She broke down screaming.

* * *

><p><strong>Cold as Ice - Foreigner<strong>

Ariadne was shouting at the expressionless Eames and Arthur knew that he should really turn back and leave their workplace until they were done.

"What do you mean?"

"Come on, darling, don't play dumb." The Forger snarled and was that not something that caught Arthur off-guard.

"You've been playing me from the start. You don't want me. Never did." The Brit cast a meaningful glance in Arthur's direction, having spotted him early on.

Ariadne stared, frozen.

"I didn't think you could be that cold, love. And here I was ready to give you more."

* * *

><p><strong>Let it Rain – Amanda Marshall<strong>

It was not fair, admittedly. Ariadne sat on the windowsill of her Paris flat and looked out at the pouring rain.

She was all by herself and deserved it. She had played a dirty hand of Poker and it had not been fair on either of the two men involved.

First, she had liked Arthur. It had been the kind of butterflies in your stomach feeling and she had loved it. The only problem was that he had retreated from her after the Fischer job and so she had taken to dirty tricks.

She had taken the slip of paper Eames had snuck into her pocket on the airport and called the Forger.

She had invited him to Paris and had really only wanted to get Arthur to come out and fight for her.

It had turned from a quick tumble into something a lot more serious and she had not expected the Forger to have a heart too.

* * *

><p><strong>Prostitute – Guns'n'Roses<strong>

Eames was watching some crime series on BBC 2 when the doorbell rang. He had taken time off, had gone to Ireland to collect himself.

Him and Arthur had stopped working together for the moment, the Point Man probably doing something similar in another part of the world.

They had both made a rookie mistake and paid the price.

They had fallen for the architect.

Arthur had fallen for her innocence and wide-eyed wonder when he taught her to work in dreams and Eames had fallen for the surprisingly saucy and straightforward woman behind it all.

Or so he had thought.

He opened the door.

"I'm sorry." She said, her hair plastered to her head and shivering from the cold irish weather.

She had played them. Him more than Arthur because he had only been there to get the other man jealous.

"I'm so so sorry. I… I did everything wrong. I… I'm sorry I hurt you… used you."

He stared at her, trying to find it in him to close the door in her face. "You really thought I did not care, didn't you?" He asked eventually. "That I was only out for a roll in the hay."

She winced at the harsh words.

* * *

><p><strong>What's my name – Rihanna<strong>

"Have you heard the story of Ariadne of Naxos?" She asked quietly, sitting in his living room, the mug of hot tea he had shoved into her hand warming her shaky palms.

"She loved Theseus, but he left her all alone." She did not look at him and it was just as well.

"Then Dionysos found her and offered to love her." Finally she met Eames's eyes.

"What if she used him? Wanting to show Theseus that she is worth more than that?" She paused, sipping at the tea meekly.

"What if she afterwards realised that she really wanted to be with him and not the mortal who left her? Because only someone who took the time to get to know her would do?"

* * *

><p><strong>The Battle of Kerak – Harry Gregson-Williams (Kingdom of Heaven OST)<strong>

Eames was not one for religion. He had been sent to catholic school because it was the only way his family could afford to give him a decent enough education and that apparently scarred him for life.

Nontheless he was reminded of all those values he had been taught which Jesus apparently promoted. It was all a whole load of bollocks, really because what would the guy have said had he been alive to see what had been done in his name? The church was not for him, he knew that.

But here he was, a girl ten years his junior sitting across from him, apologising for playing with the heart he had forgotten he had and stepping on it with high-heeled shoes, though he had only ever seen her with flats.

He did not know if he could forgive her. More importantly he did not know if he could trust her.

It had hurt. Far more than it should have and sometimes he wondered if he was growing soft the older he got.

Really though, if he thought about it, when he had been her age, he had done the same. What was this whole thing about the innocent throwing the first stone or something?

He had not only played with girls hearts, he had crushed them with little thought.

* * *

><p><strong>Into the West – Annie Lennox (LotR – OST)<strong>

Bleeding out in a dream was really such a cliché thing to happen, Ariadne thought blearily.

She was lifted against someone's chest.

Eames, she remembered a little too slowly. She was starting to get tired but it did not hurt.

"'s not that bad." She mumbled, turning her face into his shirt. "D'you think it's like this in real life?"

She felt him stiffen and then shake his head rather forcefully. "Course not, love. It would be completely different." He choked and that was something she had never heard.

She squinted up at him then.

Why was he crying? It was alright, wasn't it? She would just wake up. She wondered before she gave in to sleep.


End file.
